The Dangerous Kitchen – Concept art and preproduction for Project Earworm

At the start of my DPS year, I collaborated with The Dangerous Kitchen, the indie studio behind ‘De Mambo’. My role over the course of the next three months would be to help out with character concept art and design, as well as some visual development for environments and assets. This was an incredibly exciting opportunity that taught me so much!

Early Concept Work

I met the director of The Dangerous Kitchen, Lucy, at the games networking and showcase event Develop Brighton 2025 during a life drawing side event on the beach! I talked about how I needed experience over my DPS year, and Lucy, having been impressed with my art skills- invited me to work with her on an exciting new project in October!

In our first call together, I was given an overview and a summary of the game I was working on. I learnt its story, genre and premise. We decided according to what would be best for me and my portfolio, that 3 days a week I would begin helping Director/Designer Lucy conceptualise the character designs for this future rhythm game. We would begin with pre-production, mood boards and colour palettes, and then progress into design itself. Over the course of the next week, we curated various references to make a large collaborative moodboard on Figma.

The game, Project Earworm, is a Rhythm game about an evil earworm infecting a music-less earth. The protagonist Tae has lost her parents, using a new magical saxophone to fight different enemies and bosses, to find out what’s happening and where they went!

The tone is intended to be humorous and playful, with magical elements and pop media references. This tone is reflected in the colour palettes we choose, and the softness of the shape language. As the game is set in 2.5D and involves a lot of animation, one of the biggest visual inspirations for the art direction is Steven Universe. I was sent excerpts from the art books to help get a grasp of the art style and aesthetic that Lucy wanted to portray.

I began making sketches of the protagonist, Tae, and her close friend Tashy (who’s bubbly and obsessed with knitwear). These sketches were loose and unrefined, based on Lucy’s old concept drawings for Tae. I wanted to get a feel for how the characters and their personalities could be before undergoing the full design process.

Main Character Design – Tae

Tae is a nerd who loves to figure things out, as well as space. She’s a bit of a skeptic due to her crazy parents, has curly hair, and likes to wear comfy clothes. With Lucy I helped create her colour palette. Her signature colour is purple, and involves pinks and reds, with a touch of spacey blue and starlight yellow.

My first Tae iterations show her in an oversized sweater and jacket, with moon boots and downturned eyes. She wears ear muffs made by her mother that resemble planets, and stars cover the rest of her clothing to portray her love for space. In one iteration, her hair is in pigtails and in the other it’s tied back ponytail style. When showing these to Lucy, she loved the pigtails idea- as the shapes in her hair resemble planets! We decided to go with that hairstyle moving forward. She also commented on Tae’s eyes, and we opted to go in a cuter direction.

This was my first full body design of Tae, with her magical saxophone. I tried to incorporate our chosen colour palette the best I could, but something felt off and I didn’t know why. Lucy then reached out to one of her friends in Animation, who helped give the design some critique. One was to make her skin tone a lot warmer, as her current skin tone looked too cool, greyish and out of place. Lucy also suggested we change the shoes, and take more references from real-life fashion. Here are some of my iterations for Tae’s boots:

The boots we decided on looked far better than the original moon boots, and with the adjusted colour palette- merged seamlessly together into one cohesive design.

Now, despite Tae’s style, hair and outfit being correct- we weren’t completely happy with her facial features or the style she was drawn in. We decided to move over to photoshop and re-evaluate how we were drawing her.

Lucy was far more experienced at photoshop than me, so we had an entire session where she taught me all of her keyboard commands and how to organise layers and files in a professional setting. I was also sent a brush pack (Grutbrushes) so that I could use the same brush (Imp Linker) as Lucy and keep a cohesive look to our concepts.

We decided to make the artstyle a lot bouncie, flowier and wackier. This decision came to us after discovering and watching Kaiba, an anime directed by Masaaki Yuasa.

For a revision of Tae’s facial features, we decided to give her a downturned nose and large eyes full of expression. I exaggerated the size of her sweater even more, and refined her silhouette. The boots also became extra chunky!

I wanted to redraw the original full body pose of Tae with her saxophone in this new design and saw an overwhelming improvement in appeal! I asked one of my friends, a saxophone player, how to draw her holding and playing the instrument accurately.

Final Tae Design:

We began to figure out her final colour scheme and sweater design. At first It was difficult to find the balance between too saturated and cluttered (upper left), and too muddy and dull (upper right). We decided to make the sweater gradient end in a rich purple, rather than magenta, and to have a few intentionally placed stars rather than a design with many.

Another revision I made was to change the ends of her hair braids, giving them a poofier curlier texture to better portray her curly hair type.

Prop and background exploration

Outside of character art and design, I helped with some background concepts. We took inspiration from animation reference, and began to imagine what the interior of Tae’s house could look like.

My first backgrounds were very loose and painterly, keeping the kitchen scene as simple as possible. Unfortunately the lack of definition left the paintings feeling muddy and gloomy. I decided to retry with a much tighter use of perspective and guidelines, using line art to my advantage as well.

My second background is far more successful. Although not perfect, with weird perspectives and nonsensical shadows… I think I did alright! As someone who doesn’t draw backgrounds or design rooms/environments often, this attempt was a step in the right direction. I was glad to have tried, and I believe my background carries a lot of charm.

I also helped design some props. Particularly, the characters phones and Tae’s phone that would double as UI. We referenced cute phone cases, and the ways people customise their apps, charms and background screens into personal means of expression.

I wanted Tae’s phone to showcase her space interest. The camera is replaced with the star motif seen on her jumper, hair clips and boots.

Secondary Character designs

I helped design the first boss and some of the enemy designs of the first level. The music inspiration for this was Jpop, and the level boss would be an obsessive idol stan who cant stop dancing! Here is a moodboard Lucy put together to help me visualise the characterisation.

My first few sketches were pretty tame. Lucy emphasised that she wanted him to look less nice, and far more crazy! We also discussed that the level would be set in a supermarket, and that different foods would be dancing along to the music as well. I was to incorporate these food themes into his design.

I started by turning his hair into a ramen bowl, then making a taiyaki eat his head. I then turned his hair into actual noodles! and this was why the taiyaki saw his head as a tasty treat.

Now that i had a starting point, it wasn’t difficult to figure out the rest of his design. Because he’s a villain our protagonist is trying to defeat, I tried to emphasise the worst aspects of idol fan culture (creepy obsession and usually lack of deodorant) in the way he looked. I made some sketches displaying his move set in the game, waving light sticks around and dancing wildly.

Here are a bunch of wacky concept sketches I made for the food people/enemies that would be dancing with the boss in the level.

Promotional art concepts

Now we had a cast of characters (I can’t discuss them all In this blog entry) I was given the job of conceptualising a promotional poster. It was difficult fitting so many characters cohesively into one scene with enough flow to make a dynamic composition. Two of my thumbnail sketches are below.